He took a plea deal with prosecutors in federal court that nets him six months in prison and 1,000 hours of community service, plus four and a half years of probation. For the unfamiliar, Halderman was busted in an undercover sting in which he tried to extort more than $2 million from Letterman. If Letterman didn't pay, Halderman would go public about Letterman's secret relationships with female members of his staff.

News of the plea came as quite a surprise since he and his attorneys have waged a loud campaign to expose and humiliate Letterman in open court. Halderman has since made a public statement, as seen in the video below, apologizing to Letterman and 'Late Show' staffer Stephanie Birkett and their families.

It's time to look back to a simpler, less vicious time in late night television when the alleged extortion of a major talk show host and his office flings was all the rage in the daily news rags.

Robert Halderman, the 48 Hours producer accused of extorting Late Show host David Letterman, lost his recent bid to have a judge throw out his grand larceny charges. His defense claimed that what Letterman and the FBI call his actions blackmail, he called it simply an offer to buy a screenplay about the talk show host's life.

Call me crazy, but offers to do artistic work don't usually involve threats of dragging people through the mud for personal gain and profit. Then again, I've never worked for NBC.

More of our best of the decade coverage, which started earlier today. You can read the other posts at the link above. Here, we talk about the decade's biggest TV scandals.

Who doesn't like a little drama? We love it here at TV Squad. Of course, its usually the scripted kind that we obsess over, not the real-life variety. But it was hard to escape all of the behind-the-scenes scandals going on during the Aughts.

The backstage drama often spilled out onto the tube, in talk show interviews, reality series, and with the 24-hour news networks looking to fill time and boost their ratings. Needless to say, we had little trouble picking our top TV scandals of the '00s.

It looks like we've got the makings of a fight on our hands.
Robert Halderman, the man accused of extorting David Letterman and turning the always funny Late Show into a storm of innuendo and gossip, wants his case to go to trial and most likely won't accept a plea deal or make some sort of arrangement with prosecutors.

So far, he's got two things going for him: a whirlwind of press surrounding his case and the fallout of his arrest and money. The New York Observer reports he's raised almost $100,000 in legal funds for his case.

I hope this doesn't happen, but is it just me or is it starting to look like Halderman's trial could actually hurt Letterman and company more than it helps him?

It turns out the David Letterman sex scandal hasn't reached its climax. It was just napping.

The National Enquirer reports that the Late Show host may have been caught on camera getting it on with a member of his staff.

The footage in question came from a surveillance camera in the show's offices that Letterman and his "much younger female co-worker" did not know had been installed in the building. The tape may be released when Robert Halderman, Letterman's extorter, goes to trial or when some sick son of a bitch with nothing but time on his hands and bandwidth to waste decides to post the thing on the Internet. For the sake of humanity, its vision and waning sex drives, don't. Just don't.

I don't mean the endlessly publicized sex scandal or the Sarah Palin controversy. I don't mean the ham-fisted and unfunny political commentary -- or even the strange tales of stalkers around every corner. I mean what happened to the guy from the mid-late 1980s who seemed so above and beyond any such tired showbiz cliches?

When Letterman followed Carson during the Golden Age of NBC late night TV, his show was admittedly quirky. But it was one of the best examples of post-modern comedy in the medium's history. Late Night with David Letterman not only mocked TV entertainment while being a part of it, but the show made fun of the very idea that people get paid to gab or act silly in front of millions of people.

It's official, "pulling a Letterman" means sleeping with a co-worker. Why? Because I said so.

It seems that ABC's late night host Jimmy Kimmel has been in a relationship with a member of his staff as well. This time, the host has been dating the show's head writer Molly McNeary for "several months."

This forced Fox News to pose the question if Kimmel is "pulling a Letterman" and ask if he should be forced to apologize on the air to Ben Affleck. That normally would be hilarious if Fox News didn't handle all of their news with the same level of integrity and tact.

That bastion of journalistic excellence, Entertainment Weekly, unveiled their new cover and (surprise!) Letterman made the cover. It features the Late Show host without pants, which in any other context would be the lowest selling issue of EW since Ernest Borgnine forgot to put on underpants.

My problem isn't with the picture, although it seems it probably should be. It's the headline. Is "Oh, Dave" the best they could do? Hell, "Where the Wild Things Are" would be ten times better and save a fifth of the print space. Write a better headline in the comments section below and we'll feature the best ones in a future post.

One notably close figurehead in David Letterman-gate seems to have gone overlooked, a shiny bald one.

Letterman's longtime sidekick and band leader Paul Shaffer has just released a new memoir called We'll Be Here the Rest of Our Lives about his rise to late night music infamy. He talked more than a few ears off about his own life in music, but he's kept very hush-hush on the whole Letterman brewhaha.

"You know, I just can't talk about it," Shaffer told a Time reporter in a recent interview. "There is a legal proceeding going on. I've been advised that I can't comment on that stuff."

He couldn't even tell Harry Smith on CBS' Early Show on his own network just what the mood is like around Late Show central. However, the rest of both interviews offer a very interesting peak into a life in music that has spanned just about every end of the TV dial and a very funny diversion from Smith's persistent reporter powers to get something out of him about the whole scandal. Something tells me Shaffer would have made one hell of a good press secretary.

Just as one broadcasting legend faces his slow downfall, this week also marked the triumphant return of another to the airwaves.

Don Imus, MSNBC's former morning show man who was ousted from his TV and radio time slots for racially charged comments he made about the Rutgers' women's basketball team, returned to TV on Monday on the Fox Business Channel.

The morning shock jock wasted no time at his new home by getting back to his old tricks, lambasting everyone in the biz from David Letterman to his new co-worker Glenn Beck. And the move seems to be paying off since Fox Business scored their biggest ratings hit since ... well, ever.

It's become the new scandal of the week of the century that just won't go away. Now TVTattle.com has discovered that Stephanie Birkitt, the "former" Late Show employee who had a fling with host David Letterman, is still getting credit in the show's closing credits.

The image above lists Birkitt, the girl who also worked in front of the camera as Vicki the prize girl during the show's "Know Your Current Events" bit, as Letterman's assistant.

Talk about a scandal that literally just won't go away. Of course, there are a number of explanations for this (it's just an inside joke, it was a mistake, etc.) Keep watching the closing credits and see if her name still pops up under the "assistants" slot and be sure to let us know below if you see it.

He played it all very light-hearted, saying that the grand jury was probably shocked to learn he was having sex, and that the moment he knew something was amiss, he started thinking about every single bad thing he'd ever done in his life.

The funny thing is, the studio audience just lapped it up, applauding at just about everything Dave said. He didn't say exactly when the affairs happened, but I'm guessing in the not too distant past. He said, "Would it be embarrassing if it were made public? Perhaps it would. I feel like I need to protect these people. I need to certainly protect my family."

He married Regina Lasko in March, but they've been together a while, because they have a six-year-old son, Harry. I wonder if Regina will be as forgiving as the studio audience.